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“She didn’t make it, I’m afraid. There was an aneurysm…” Grace Higham said, her voice trailing off.
Charity suddenly had trouble hearing anything clearly for a moment. She found herself hyperventilating. Tears flowed down her cheeks.
“I’m very sorry to have to tell you that,” Grace Higham was saying somewhat stiffly. “But you do realize that this may not be your friend. There sadly are too many such stories….”
Charity struggled to hold back her deepest emotions.
“Can you tell me how to find this Manor place?” she said after a moment, her voice shaking. “I pray you’re right, that it’s not Ann. But, if it is, I need to know. And, if it isn’t, maybe I can get Sara to tell me something.”
Grace Higham thought about that, then said, “I have been meaning to get over there to visit but simply have not had a moment to spare. I do think that I could go with you now.”
“Thank you,” Charity said. “Can you drive? We can take my car. But I don’t think I’m right now in any condition to do so.”
“Of course,” Grace Higham said, surprised by the lieutenant’s vulnerability and how she was unafraid to show it.
She studied Lieutenant Hoche a moment, then decided that maybe she had been indeed a bit quick to judge this book by its cover.
The forty-five-kilometer drive south—with a ten-minute stop for Charity, who thought she might be getting sick to her stomach—had taken them just shy of an hour.
Charity Hoche and Grace Higham stood with a squat woman who wore a white nurse’s outfit. They were in the doorway of what not very long ago—no more than a month—had been a working barn at Manor House.
The four horses that had been there had been moved to another barn nearby. The dirt floor had been improved, concrete poured, and the stalls modified so that they now resembled small rooms. Additional rooms had been built, fashioned from boarding. And wooden bunks had been built to hold straw mattresses.
Charity Hoche had been shocked by all that she had seen as they had walked through the main building of Manor House, past the patients there, then out to the barn.
There were indeed patients, all progressing well in their recovery, as Ann Chambers had written in her article. And there were the children. But also there were patients who looked like ghosts, some with grave injuries that had left them looking h
orrid.
Charity could not help but notice that these extreme cases even had a smell of death about them.
Ann hadn’t written about them because what she had written about was bleak enough.
Ann knew her audience. They wanted to read about the good that Grace Higham was doing.
Dwelling on the darkness would have lost a lot of readers—ones who would not have finished the piece, and then not have sent the packages of toys and animals for the children.
Then Charity had another thought and it was a struggle for her to contain the wave of emotion that came with it.
Was that how Ann looked—and smelled—before that artery burst in her head?
“Now, I must caution you,” the squat nurse was saying, “that what you’re about to see may be disturbing.”
“We’ll be fine,” Grace Higham said, then looked at Charity and added: “Both of us.”
This little lady has a backbone of steel, Charity thought.
“Very well,” the nurse said in an officious tone.
They came to one of the stalls converted into a room. There was the shape of a female on her back under the white sheet. The sheet was slowly rising and falling with her breathing.
The nurse motioned that they could go in.
As they stepped forward together, Grace Higham suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, God!”
Charity inhaled deeply, then whispered, “Ann!”
“Say that again,” Charity Hoche told the squat nurse as Charity, her eyes red, gently stroked Ann Chambers’s dark hair.
